Inspired By: Ty Mattson

I first found the design work of Ty Mattson at the beginning of the last season of Lost when he designed posters for his own personal season 6 premiere party. As a fan of the show I thought the posters were pretty rad and have continued to follow Mattson’s blog ever since. His whole portfolio is immaculate down to the tiniest detail. Plus, his studio is in an old lima bean processing warehouse in Irvine.

This first series of posters was then picked up by ABC!! And sold on their website to the whole world. How amazingly cool is that! His own personal invites to his own personal party were made into ABC merchandise.

Lesson Number 1: Design everything you can with 100% effort no matter how small of a design job it is or if it is just for the fun of it.

Then Mattson outdoes himself with creating a poster each week for the Lost series final season. He used stark and simple illustrations again but this time all were created as a white illustration on a black background. And those also made it into the ABC online store.

Continuing for Lesson Number 1, Mattson made his son, Shepard’s birth announcement earlier this year and made it onto just about every design blog I read. Again, his passion for clean, clear design came through down to the tiniest detail even on a design that was just being sent out to family. And by posting it on his blog, he reached the masses by the countless repostings of his work. Mattson’s passion for his son showed through this design to me like nothing he has created yet.

Then Mattson does it again, but this time with the show Dexter. At the beginning of this month, Mattson posted an illustrated poster for each season of Dexter so far depicting the “iconic moments of the show.” Again, see the detail in each of these posters. Each one must have taken hours and hours to design and he had no insurity these would ever make him money, but he was passionate.

Lesson Number 2: Pour passion into your work, whether commercial or personal.

Did all this time and effort pay off? Why yes of course it did. I wake up this morning to a new blog post by Mattson showcasing photos of the Dexter set that he was invited to because of his designs. He says on his blog that within 24 hours of his original posting of the Dexter prints, the producers had contacted him and wanted their own prints of his work. This is amazing to me.

It is so encouraging to me to see Ty Mattson’s work and to see his effort+passion paying off big time. He’s such an amazing designer and I can’t wait to see what he turns out next. Congrats Ty!